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Tim Peeler |
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The Fat Man at the Ball Park Geoff's second wife was Romanian, a beauty with a small pointed nose like a fox, greenish brown eyes and long slim legs. Geoff was gaunt-faced and dark bearded, dressed in flannel and jeans, black boots, a red ball cap always pulled to his brow. He met her at the community college, fresh from her homeland, enrolled in a radiography program. He could barely believe his luck, often pondered his worthiness, she'd come here, a lottery visa winner, but he felt like the lottery winner tracing the curve of her back, late at night, listening to stories of back home. The baseball game was his idea, a local minor league team; she sat and read a foreign novel while he munched on peanuts, hollered at batters and pitchers, and drank a bit too much. He was a poet of sorts who often wrote about the game and had a small reputation for his work. When she caught him staring up at the bleachers, her face soured; "That girl can't be more than thirteen," she said, referring to the young girl in short shorts midriff displayed, talking on a cell phone. "I'm watching the fat man; I'm going to write a poem about him, the fat man who's always up there in that same spot." "Why a fat man?" she asked, turning a page in her novel. "He's always there, wearing that same dark blue Yankees cap, holding his scorecard, shifting uncomfortably on the metal seat; he's poetic, don't you see?" When the foul ball smacked Geoff, it was a direct hit, a nineteen year-old Puerto Rican's slow bat slicing through the zone a micro-second late. It took eight stitches to sew his cheek up; the baseball seams left red marks that finally went away in six months. The next season, after his second wife had left him, he went back to the park. The fat man was still there in the same seat, wearing his dark blue Yankees cap, carefully keeping his game card, a bit heavier maybe; he couldn't decide. Brody Who's to say that it matters how much meat lies between you and the bone. Every man bears the fingerprint of his burden with whatever grit it takes. And you have known forever the coiled darkness that drives a good man to his knees. I see your face engraved by the living as you embrace the stage or the trial, facing a judge either way. |